One child, many tragedies

It is not often that a radio interview ends with both the interviewer and interviewee in tears.

But that is what happened when I spoke to Chinese writer, Xinran, in The World Today studio yesterday. We held it together while the microphones were on but the emotional power of her book, which tells the harrowing stories of women who are forced to abandon or even kill their daughters at birth, was too much.

It may be the world's economic powerhouse but China retains a population control policy from the 1970s that is regarded by many, inside and outside the country, as draconian. And that policy has reinforced a much older tradition that favours the birth of boys.

Xinran - she is so well known as a former radio host in her native China that she uses only her first name - says she wrote "Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother" for the more than 100,000 Chinese babies each year who are adopted overseas, and for their parents.

She describes how when she was on tour with her first book - the bestselling The Good Women of China, which she wrote after she had left China for the UK - she was mobbed by Chinese girls who were adopted overseas:

"They all come to me, ask me the same questions. They always say why my Chinese mum didn't love me or didn't want me. Some kids even gave me a terrible guessing like 'my mum is a criminal' or 'because I am ugly' or 'because Chinese mums are all very crude'. So I thought it unfair to the mother and the daughter because I believe, from the mothers I met in China, they all love their children in different way.

"If they are educated they knew how to use the beautiful sentence to describe their pain or their failing. If they've never been educated they imagine the life. They even say oh please tell those bigger nose mother, they call the foreigners 'bigger nose mother', don't hold my baby on the right, on the left please because the left is close to the heart, baby feels safe. And there were some even saying, oh please tell those bigger nose mum, don't let my baby start working before five years old, because they never been educated (about life in the west). So I just hope I could write a book to those secret mothers and not-forgotten daughters."

She said it was a terribly painful book for her to write and that she is haunted by the women's stories she collected in her travels around China, as she now tours the world to talk about them. She also wrote about her own struggle to keep the orphaned baby girl she was trying to foster. She failed. She already had a child of her own and was told that she would put the careers and families of her colleagues at risk if she didn't deliver the little girl to an orphanage.

When I asked her if, as well as the message for the adopted girls, she had a message for the government, she made it clear that the pain felt by the women and girls she spoke to could not be blamed only on the one child policy.

"In many ways we have improved quite a lot, the living condition, education, economic power. But this country has been rooted in over 5,000 years of cultural beliefs, particularly this kind of male cultural beliefs that you have to give a boy to the family tree. So in the city it is no difference between a woman in Sydney or Melbourne to Chinese in Shanghai or Beijing. But if you drive to the countryside now you will see."

She says discrimination against baby girls is centuries old and she told me in chilling detail of an ancient ritual surrounding birth that involved a special birthing bowl:

"At the top level is the warm water for washing a boy. That's called 'root water'. Now underneath is boiling water, yes, and that is called 'killing water'. So when you find this baby delivered is a boy, you wash it and it is a part of the family. If it is a girl you just turn the top, drop this girl into the bottom - boiled. So sometimes I really think how much we really have improved."

Sometimes it is the midwife who performs this horrific act but sometimes it is the mother and Xinran says the suicide statistics for women, which in contrast to the international trends are higher than for men, are a hidden barometer of this anguish.

"Since the 1980s and 1990s women commit suicide and they become higher and higher. I didn't realise why until I met them. Some women told me, before we never left village. Lots of women when they come to the city they realise life could be different. At least a man and a woman could live in equal or a girl can have the same life as a boy. So that made lots of mothers feel the pain - very painful and they realised they killed their own daughters."

Xinran says no one tells these stories within China. She also says that, while it is possible to trace the number of babies adopted overseas each year, as to the number of baby girls killed:"this number you will never find".

She says the Chinese government is not proud of the number of Chinese babies that are being adopted overseas. But while this doesn't make her optimistic that the one child policy will be removed anytime soon, she says she has noticed a shift in China in recent years and that people are now asking: "Why we can't look after our own children?"

As well as writing her book to tell these children about their birth mothers and the stories of those babies even less fortunate, Xinran has set up a charity called Mother Bridge of Love.

And if you want to hear from another female author telling stories from her oppressed country, have a listen to Zimbabwean, Petina Gappah. Her style is fiction - and very funny fiction at that - but her book An Elegy for Easterly, also provides window on some of the unspoken realities and taboos for people in her country.

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